News Flashes

Basho has announced the general availability of version 2.0 of its NoSQL database Riak, which extends the platform in five major ways: search, security, advanced data types, ease of use, and the tiered storage.

Recognizing that it is the startups that need enterprise features and high level support more than anyone else, but are least equipped to pay for it, Aerospike Inc. has announced a startup special to attract new customers to its open source flash optimized, in-memory open source NoSQL database. In addition, Aerospike has also announced a new trade-in program, that allows enterprises to swap out certain existing technology for Aerospike Enterprise Edition, for no cost throughout the duration of their standing software and support licenses.

A new solution from BMC Software is designed to help reduce the need for multiple mainframe subsystems. The new software, BMC Subsystem Optimizer for zEnterprise, removes the traditional requirement that DB2, IMS and CICS subsystems must reside on the same logical partition (LPAR) to communicate and process workloads, the vendor said. Overcoming this requirement translates to "significant" mainframe monthly license costs (MLC) savings of up to 20% or more, according to BMC.

On the heels of the announcement of Compuware's planned acquisition by Thoma Bravo LLC, a private-equity company, Compuware says it plans to divide into two separate operating units - one for its mainframe business, and the other for its application performance management business.

IBM has developed new M5 servers that are designed to support a wide range of enterprise workloads and computing environments, from infrastructure basics to cloud computing to big data and analytics. The M5 portfolio includes highly configurable models of rack and tower servers, dense systems, blades and integrated systems.

A new line of PowerEdge servers from Dell, equipped with advancements in storage, processing and memory technology. The Dell PowerEdge 13th generation server portfolio is based on five form-factors across blades, racks and towers.

Ericcson and SAP have announced plans for Ericsson to offer SAP's cloud-based enterprise mobility management portfolio Mobile Secure combined with an IT managed service offering, thereby expanding Ericsson's portfolio of services available for its more than 400 mobile network operators. Worldwide, Ericsson manages networks that serve 600 million subscribers and additionally provides managed services for networks that serve 1 billion subscribers. The companies cited estimates that the enterprise mobility management market will reach $2.1 billion by 2016.

Vormetric, Intel, and MongoDB have worked together to integrate and test a combined configuration which they say overcomes the longstanding concern that adoption of encryption technologies might reduce throughput and capacity of a database implementation. With the combined solution set, they say, not only is there no degradation in performance, but performance with encryption greatly exceeds that without encryption. "With Vormetric, MongoDB customers not only gain critical safeguards required for use of sensitive data, but incur no performance penalties due to the additional performance boost available from the optimized Intel hardware encryption, and Vormetric's kernel driver optimization," said Vijay Vijayasankar, VP of Global Channels and Business Development at MongoDB Inc.

Enhancements in Yellowfin 7.1 are concentrated on extending its capabilities in core technical areas by increasing the number of visualizations supported by Yellowfin's Auto Chart functionality and improving CSV support. In addition, Yellowfin provides the ability to track data geographically and that improves with version 7.1. "The ability to combine location-relevant information with other business data and map that insight is becoming increasingly important across the board," said Yellowfin CEO Glen Rabie.

Many in the industry have begun to look to data lakes and Hadoop as the future for data storage. To help shed light on the data lake approach, the pros and cons of this data repository were considered in a recent Unisphere webcast presented by Peter Evans, BI and analytics product evangelist and product technologist consultant, Dell Software; and Elliot King, Unisphere Research analyst.

Continuing its push to help developers create new connected apps for the Internet of Things, Embarcadero has made the latest release of Appmethod available to active subscribers and new Appmethod developers. The release is aimed at helping developers streamline the creation of apps for IoT using a single app development platform and shared C++ codebase. According to Embarcadero, Appmethod September 2014 Release provides a complete software development solution for building natively compiled C++ apps that connect mobile and desktop devices, sensors, gadgets, wearables, cloud services, and data.

DataStax, a data management company that provides an enterprise distribution of Apache Cassandra, has scored $106 million in Series E financing. With this new round of funding, DataStax says it plans to continue to drive enterprise adoption and innovation in Apache Cassandra, and will further invest in the developer community, which now spans over 80 countries. DataStax also plans to continue its momentum in Europe, Asia and Japan by rapidly growing engineering, sales and marketing teams in those regions.

Broadening the range of tools at its disposal to help customers who are grappling with emerging technologies for leveraging unstructured data, Teradata this week announced its acquisition of Think Big Analytics, a consulting and solutions company that is focused exclusively on Hadoop and open source big data solutions.

Oracle Gold Partner EmeraldCube Solutions has introduced its offering of Oracle Business Intelligence Managed Services. With this new offering, the company assumes responsibility for monitoring and supporting OBIEE for a fixed monthly fee and provides SLA based support, routine maintenance activities, real-time server monitoring, and on-demand hours that can be personalized by company need.

China Telecom Corporation Limited and IBM have entered into a 3-year agreement to help small and medium businesses implement SAP cloud-based applications. The announcement is a key step in the Chinese cloud computing market that will provide one of the fastest growing segments within China greater access to cloud resources, said D.C. Chien, general manager and chief executive officer, IBM Greater China Group.

SAP SE has introduced a secure enterprise app store that allows companies to push their mobile apps into the hands of employees, business partners and consumers. The Mobile Place feature delivers apps, services and content to both managed and unmanaged mobile devices. The new Mobile Place feature is included at no additional cost with the purchase of SAP Mobile Secure portfolio.

To help companies evaluate big data systems, a new benchmark has been launched by the Transaction Processing Performance Council (TPC). TPCx-HS is a major achievement for two reasons, noted Raghunath Nambiar, chairman of the TPCx-HS committee, and a distinguished engineer at Cisco. It is the first vendor-neutral benchmark focused on big data systems - which have become a critical part of the enterprise IT ecosystem. TPCx-HS is also the first Express-class benchmark issued by the TPC.

A new integration service from Jitterbit is aimed at SAP customers who find difficulty with integration of their existing solutions to be the biggest obstacle to incorporating new cloud technologies. The new Jitterbit Harmony SAP Connector helps organizations streamline crucial business processes with SAP integration between SAP ECC, CRM, vertical applications, and more than a thousand enterprise endpoints, ranging from legacy on-premise software to new cloud-based solutions.

SoftLayer, an IBM Company, has begun shipping new bare-metal servers that are billed by the hour. The new hourly bare-metal servers are single tenant servers connecting directly to SoftLayer's private global network. Customers may choose from four base configurations with the CentOS, Red Hat, FreeBSD, or Ubuntu operating system installed. IBM says the base configuration is deployed within 30 minutes, after which the server may be further customized with additional OS or application installations.

Emulex has a new solution that enables bare-metal adapter configuration management, rapid provisioning and deployment capabilities for cloud-based infrastructures. The first Emulex OpenWorks Connector is used with the new Emulex OneConnect OCec14000 series of Cloud Adapters.

Logentries, a cloud log management and analytics service, has introduced a new solution intended to help Dev and IT Ops proactively monitor, troubleshoot and resolve production system issues in real time. "It's particularly important to not only monitor errors in your logs, but proactively recognize where there has been a shift in system behavior," said Trevor Parsons, co-founder and chief scientist for Logentries.

At its recent user conference, VMware announced new virtualization, cloud management and integrated OpenStack solutions that are part of a product portfolio designed for implementing software-defined data centers. The innovations support open frameworks, as well as hybrid cloud environments based on VMware and non-VMware technologies.

Maestro 2.0, the latest version of Attunity's big data management and data distribution platform, offers new capabilities, including logic and event-driven process control, which enables increased power over business processes, and greater IT efficiency and productivity across global and distributed infrastructures.

In a new release of Logi Vision, Logi Analytics is combining new analytical capabilities with social features to support data discovery for users ranging from data scientists to anyone who needs data-driven insights. Logi Vision 1.3 is being made available to try as a downloadable, full-featured version, so anyone can work with their spreadsheets, cloud applications and corporate data within the security of their workplace, or via a hosted trial option.

While the potential use of IoT information may be thrilling, a question that remains is how the data will be tracked from all of these new interconnected devices. A recent DBTA webcast provided a look at what the not-too-distant future will hold concerning the Internet of Things and how data is processed. The webcast featured Michael Hummel, CTO of ParStream, Robert Geiger, vice president of products at TransLattice, and Hannah Smalltree, director of Treasure Data, who talked about their companies' unique approaches to helping customers derive value from IoT data.

Oracle has released Oracle E-Business Suite 12.2.4, which provides an updated user experience, customer-driven enhancements across the suite, and more integrations to Oracle Cloud Solutions. "Organizations today need to provide the workforce with a more modern user interface, and address business challenges with greater automation and efficiency," said Cliff Godwin, senior vice president, Oracle Applications Development.

A new software platform and supporting services from GT Software enables users to access critical information from across the organization, regardless of where the data resides, on or off the mainframe. GT Software's Data Unification Solution includes Ivory Data Hub v5.3, which provides SQL support for all data types, both on and off the mainframe, including VSAM, DB2, Oracle, and SQL Server.

The Internet of Things integrates multiple wired and wireless communication, control, and IT technologies, which connect various terminals or subsystems under a unified platform that uses open and standardized data technologies such as XML/web services/SOA. So how will this impact you and/or your organization? The biggest areas of concern are security and privacy.

Why do tens of thousands of Oracle customers, partners, and consultants descend on Moscone Center in San Francisco for the annual Oracle OpenWorld conference? Despite the proliferation of conferences and online events competing for attention, OpenWorld remains the single, central place for all things Oracle. Here, DBTA presents the annual Who to See @ Oracle OpenWorld special section.

With the opportunities and obstacles presented by developments such as big data, cloud, and mobility, the challenges of managing and extracting value from data have never been greater. At the same time, the array of technology options for storing, protecting, integrating, enhancing and analyzing data has exploded. To help add perspective and acknowledge the products and services that have been deemed to provide unique value to customers, DBTA created this new competition. Here are the winners of the 2014 DBTA Readers' Choice Awards.

After 20 years in the MultiValue market, most recently as vice president of the U2 and D3 Business Areas of Rocket Software, Susie Siegesmund is retiring. In an interview, Siegesmund reflected on the changes that have taken place in MultiValue and the emerging opportunities in this sector of the IT market.

Revelation Software will showcase the next major release of OpenInsight at its 2015 users conference in Houston, Texas, March 24-27. RevCon15 will take place at the Omni Houston Hotel, which is centrally located in the Uptown Post Oak/Galleria area.

Kore Technologies will be one of the featured vendors at Encounter, the annual Eclipse Users Group Conference, taking place September 17-19 in Atlanta. Mark Dobransky, co-founder and managing partner of Kore, will present a session titled "Integration and Data Warehousing with Eclipse" on Friday, September 19, at 2 pm. The presentation will include a live demonstration of Kourier Integrator's data warehousing capabilities.

North Iowa Area Community College (NIACC) is deploying Entrinsik Informer as its new reporting solution to allow end users to create and run their own reports, and leverage dashboard creation and data analysis capabilities. In evaluating new solutions, NIACC sought to implement a reporting solution that could be set up to easily answer questions as they arise; and provide the ability to join tables and views in the background giving the end user access to more data with less reliance on technology services.

Data representations such as JSON and XML have the ability to extend well beyond the three dimensions supported by the MultiValue data model. Processing this data efficiently can present challenges when needing to parse or update large multi-dimensional data items, according to Pick Cloud and Ladybridge Systems, which will jointly present a webinar that introduces the concept of data collections that use extensions to the familiar MultiValue environment to store and manipulate arbitrarily multi-dimensional data.

With the opportunities and obstacles presented by developments such as big data, cloud, and mobility, the challenges of managing and extracting value from data have never been greater. At the same time, the array of technology options for storing, protecting, integrating, enhancing and analyzing data has exploded. To help add perspective and acknowledge the products and services that have been deemed to provide unique value to customers, DBTA created this new competition. Here are the winners of the 2014 DBTA Readers' Choice Awards.

The deluge of big data available for analysis presents great opportunity, but many organizations are having difficulty managing it. This has led to companies not being able to process valuable data, or having to delete sets of data to clear room for the massive amounts of new data.

Idera, a provider of application and server management solutions, has updated its SQL Compliance Manager, SQL Diagnostic Manager and SQL Safe Backup products with features that improve ease of use, efficiency and performance for database administrators. Idera has also added new support for Microsoft Hyper-V in SQL Diagnostic Manager so that customers can monitor the performance of physical and virtual server environment across both VMware and Microsoft.

China Telecom Corporation Limited and IBM have entered into a 3-year agreement to help small and medium businesses implement SAP cloud-based applications. The announcement is a key step in the Chinese cloud computing market that will provide one of the fastest growing segments within China greater access to cloud resources, said D.C. Chien, general manager and chief executive officer, IBM Greater China Group.

SAP SE has introduced a secure enterprise app store that allows companies to push their mobile apps into the hands of employees, business partners and consumers. The Mobile Place feature delivers apps, services and content to both managed and unmanaged mobile devices. The new Mobile Place feature is included at no additional cost with the purchase of SAP Mobile Secure portfolio.

With the game-changing potential of big data, data governance continues to grow in importance. To better understand the impact of new data sources on data governance practices, IBM commissioned Unisphere Research, a division of Information Today, Inc., to survey IT and business stakeholders at organizations across North America. The survey report has just been released and is now available.

During its annual user conference in San Francisco, Couchbase launched the beta release of Couchbase Server 3.0. As part of the beta release, Couchbase is also announcing a contest - the Couchbase Server 3.0 Bug Bash.

The Internet of Things (IoT) has the potential to transform how and when decisions are made throughout business and our daily lives, but only if that data can be processed and analyzed effectively. Join DBTA for a special webcast featuring Robert Geiger, vice president, Products, at TransLattice; Michael Hummel, CTO of ParStream; and Hannah Smalltree, director of Treasure Data, to learn about the key technologies and practices shaping the future. This webcast takes place August 26 at 2 pm ET/ 11 am PT.

To help companies evaluate big data systems, a new benchmark has been launched by the Transaction Processing Performance Council (TPC). TPCx-HS is a major achievement for two reasons, noted Raghunath Nambiar, chairman of the TPCx-HS committee, and a distinguished engineer at Cisco. It is the first vendor-neutral benchmark focused on big data systems - which have become a critical part of the enterprise IT ecosystem. TPCx-HS is also the first Express-class benchmark issued by the TPC.